Noticias!

www.slideshare.net/quintacabecadomato/nova-eco-aldeia-20112
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Apologies to all, the blog is probably going to take a back seat now for the darker months. We’re really struggling with electricity at the moment, and given the choice of cooking dinner with the light on or updating the blog, I’m afraid dinner will win every time. I’ve been developing a bit of a Val Kilmer jawline recently from holding a torch clamped between my teeth when we’ve overdone it and run out of power, and I’ve learnt that lesson well.

So a brief update today, and I’ll be back with photos and more news when our fairy godmother buys us more solar panels (@Santa – are you reading this? ).

We’ve brought in the olive harvest successfully, in record time. Photos to follow at some point. Jeroen is still working on the straw bale project and has attended a workshop about working with traditional lime which he’s very excited about. I’ve been taking some time to work with our volunteers in the veg garden which has been a little neglected over the last few months. It’s been feeding us faithfully, so it’s very sad to see the remaining plants now all black and slimy and the last tomatoes and peppers rotting. The saddest day for me, and certainly the end of the season, was the morning after our first frost when I harvested all the little pumpkins and squashes which the previous day had held such opportunity and would now never fully ripen.

We’ve been feasting on those wonderful winter treats of roasted chestnuts and foraged parasol mushrooms. As ever with the mushrooms it’s been feast or famine so I tried a new method of preserving them and tried lightly pickling then storing in olive oil. The downside of all preserving efforts is that you should let them mature for at least a few weeks before tasting. I’ll report back in due course.

Despite the cold, it’s encouraging to see life in the garden still. I dug up and replanted a bucket full of garlics I found growing in one of the paths yesterday. It doesn’t matter how much I sift through, I always miss a pile! We also have self seeded leaf beet and lettuce popping up all over, and in the forest area there is a patch of potatoes which have just shown their leaves. They’re destined to failure of course, but I feel they really should have known better than to spring up in December!

Which reminds me, the potatoes we planted in the freshly cleared bramble patch I wrote about a few months ago turned out to be the biggest we’ve ever grown on this site. Way to go! It’s beautiful soil down there, so we need to plant up again quickly before the weeds get another foothold.

Incredibly, our strawberries are still fruiting. A handful of strawberries in the morning with breakfast doesn’t do much to dispel the chill, but it makes you feel more cheerful!

We’ve been busy building more raised beds and will be topping up this year’s once the last of the tomatoes are out. Finally we’re using all the bracken we cut in the summer months. We could actually have done with about three times as much! It’s incredible the quantity of organic material we can get through. Nothing organic leaves this farm, and we have various inputs, yet we’re still begging for more! It’s fabulous seeing the molehills spreading over the land. Some gardeners might complain about them, but we recognise them as a sign of a growing earthworm population and rejoice.

The biggest job we’re embarking on at the moment is building a terrace on the strawberry patch. It’s on a slope which means that our beds gradually creep downhill over time. So we’re making use of some old tyres, recycled from a local garage, to build a terrace wall. There’s a lot of digging involved, but I reckon it’ll be fantastic. Must remember to take some photos.

OK, my battery warning light is on so I’ll be off. Please keep following and keep in touch. Your feedback means a lot to us, even when we’re not as plugged in as we’d like to be.

 

 

Que bom ter maneira de guardar bastante lenha para o inverno, nem que seja um telheiro improvisado, a lenha vai estar muito mais seca e fácil de atear fogo!! How nice to have way to store enough wood for the winter, even if it is a makeshift shed, the wood will be much drier and easier to fire! Também para cortar troncos grandes é muito melhor com um "cavalete" ... Also to cut large logs is much better with a sawhorse :D

We have had an incredible year at the Awakened Life Project…beautiful and generous volunteers, meditation retreats, open days, permaculture courses, womens retreats, evolution of consciousness courses in Porto & Lisbon…and lots of building work to enable us to meet the growing interest in the creation of a new culture in surrender to the call of evolution. We have lots of events planned for 2012!!

Please support us during our Meditation Marathon to raise funds to complete the new buildings and come and visit us in 2012. Even a small donation will help, for example 5€ will buy a fruit tree! You can see the progress here…

Join me for a short walk around the Awakened Life Project farm and get a feel for the environment that we are developing here.

If you feel inspired please support us with a donation, however small, for our Meditation Marathon…

Juntem-se a mim para um curto passeio pela quinta do Projeto Vida Desperta para ter uma ideia sobre o que estamos a desenvolver aqui.

Se se sentirem inspirados por favor, ajudem-nos com uma doação, por menor que seja, para a nossa Maratona de Meditação...

Activities like this – saving seed to plant next year with enough over to share with friends and neighbours – could soon be literally illegal. Technically, in Portugal it already is. Sitting here stripping seed from the dried seed heads of various plants that have been hanging up drying in paper bags recycled from the padaria, I’ve found myself thinking about this often.

The basic human rights to air, water, food, shelter, are being progressively hijacked and turned into revenue streams for multinational corporations. First they did it with shelter. Then water. Now it’s food and medicinal plants.

And if the corporate profit-machine could think of a way to suck all the air out of the atmosphere and sell it back to us in tanks (with all manner of fancy-sounding purification processes and exotic premium sources – ‘Alpine fresh’, ‘Tropical sea shore’ – and designer breathing-apparatus in this season’s colours to make sure we buy a new set at least every year), no doubt they would.

Despite the fact that this misappropriation of food plants and restriction of choice constitutes a violation in fundamental human rights whichever way you look at it, it’s happening quietly in legislatures world-wide. Before people are even aware of it, the right to grow and share their own food has been turned into a government-authorised privilege that can be summarily revoked. Even saving your own seed from heirloom varieties and sharing that seed with your neighbours and friends will become illegal.

And in tandem with this, more and more patents are being approved on ‘developments’ in plant and animal breeding that, on closer examination, are no such thing.

Think I’m scaremongering? Don’t think it could happen where you live? Think again … if your government is a signatory to Codex Alimentarius, it already is. Will it succeed? Well, that’s up to you and me. If we do nothing, it will.

Rather than it being illegal to save and grow your own seeds, what’s of doubtful legality is the process by which this became ‘law’ in the first place. Even if technically lawful, morally and ethically it’s nothing of the kind. Laws devised and enacted-by-proxy by self-serving unaccountable commercial interests are not worthy of that designation.

It is, of course, impossible to ignore how consistent these tactics are with the modus operandi of the giant agrotech companies Syngenta, Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and DuPont. During the last decade or so, with genetically modified crops meeting increasing public resistance, these 5 companies have between them bought around 200 conventional seed companies and now completely dominate the global seed market. Since most of them are also developing ‘terminator technology‘, the capability to produce plants with sterile seeds (requiring growers to purchase new seeds from them every planting season) and so-called ‘junkie’ plants (ones whose growth and maturation is tied to the application of certain proprietary chemicals) it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to point to where this is all leading. For these companies, it’s just business as usual.

Back in 1999, they were forced to bow to intense global pressure and issue undertakings not to develop and sell terminator technology, but it’s now plain they were lying and merely biding their time until the furore died down and they could get supportive legislation in through the back door. This is the process that’s now underway in our legislatures.

Gandhi comes to mind … “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless or, which is the same thing, corrupt.”

See also …
Seedsavers
Campanha Europeia pelas Sementes Livres
No Patents on Seeds

Rocketing through the winter

Things are continuing to progress at the Hive, with the lower floor of
the office starting to become a cosy space thanks to a new rocket
stove heated bench! We've had several volunteers involved in crafting
this masterpiece, and look forward to having a new door for the
basement so that we can spend the chillier evenings inside being warm.

We are starting to put plans together for two periods of work on the
project next year - three weeks at a time with up to 6
volunteers tentatively in early February and late March. We hope to
get a lot of work done on both the office space and the end house of
the village for long term residents. So please get in touch if this
interests you.

Work continues in finding the funds for the January payment of 2000 euros - so far we have secured 25% of this payment plus 25% of our running costs. We still have some way to go to reach the full amount needed and as always, if you are able to help in any way, we would welcome your support... Please get in touch as soon as possible if you would like to be involved in this way.

Looking forward to the New Year and the opportunities it brings.
Seasons greetings!!